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9 Unwrapping an enigma: Soviet
elites, Gorbachev and the end of
the Cold War
Vladislav M. Zubok
The rapid and peaceful dissolution of the structures of the Cold War, soon followed
by the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, left scholars and other observers with
intriguing questions. Indeed, the term ‘enigma’ was quickly adopted by journalists
in order to describe this surprising succession of events. It has since also passed
into the scholarly literature. ‘Enigma’ is quite possibly the most suitable rendering
for the unique, even strangely peaceful way the bipolar global confrontation ended,
strangely peaceful in the context of the dismal, bloody events characteristic of the
rest of the twentieth century. In straining to effectively explain the Cold War’s
denouement, this author once borrowed an image from the military lexicon: it was
as if the Soviet high command became engaged, by their own choice, in a serious
offensive; at a certain point, that offensive developed into a defensive action;
finally, the military forces surrendered without offering any serious opposition.
For the fact is, the leader of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev, preferred to preside over
the dissolution of the empire and the state rather than mobilize force in an attempt
to preserve it. The key power elites then failed to oppose his choice.1
Today, several years after first applying this military analogy, we know much
more about the circumstances surrounding the ‘enigma’ of the Cold War’s end.
Most importantly, historians have begun the painstaking study of relevant
archives, which supplement the faulty yet no less irreplaceable ‘oral histories’
produced by witnesses of various ranks and personal knowledge of events. We
can refer now to a first generation of writings, embracing empirical studies, the-
oretical works and dozens of memoirs.2 Collections of archival documents have
become available to researchers. These include the Reagan–Gorbachev corre-
spondence, together with the records of their summits, memoranda of conversa-
tions held by the Soviet leader with statesmen and politicians, select Politburo
records and the CIA’s Soviet estimates. Several scholarly conferences have also
been convened at which veterans of the events being studied actually participated.
This has resulted in valuable additional testimonies.3
In a recent memoir, Gorbachev’s adviser Georgy Shakhnazarov, a perceptive
political scientist, mused:
Even today many dramatic episodes in the reformation undertaken by
Gorbachev remain a mystery. Loads of documents and thousands of books
are published . . .Still many episodes of this drama are shrouded in the veils
of enigma. How could it happen that perestroika, having started in the inter-
est of the reformation of society and improvement of people’s lives, having
given them democracy and freedom, ended up in the collapse of the Soviet
Union, plunging Russia into a profound crisis?4
Shakhnazarov did not provide any answers to his question, having died shortly
before his memoirs appeared in print.
This chapter does not pretend to pierce the veil of the enigma referred to by
Shakhnazarov. Instead, I will focus my remarks on what I perceive to be the two
most outstanding problems of interpretation. The first is the character of those
key Soviet elites on whom the future of Soviet power depended. The other is the
nature of Gorbachev’s leadership and the question of his personality.
Grandchildren of the revolution: the decline of Soviet elites
A few general observations should be made about the evolution of Soviet elites in
the post-Stalin era.
Social profile. The recruitment of party and state elites in the Soviet Union had
its demographic ‘waves’ and ‘troughs’. More specifically, there were distinct age
cohorts to be found in the upper echelons of the Soviet government, cohorts dis-
tinguished by the varying historical and cultural circumstances of their recruit-
ment into the regime. The officials who filled the dominant ranks in the party and
state nomenklatura and in the security apparatuses during the 40 years preceding
Gorbachev were persons who were in their late 20s and 30s when Stalin’s purges
raised them to positions of authority. The vast majority had nothing to do with the
old Russian middle classes, not to mention with the old communist elites that had
been destroyed. In the early 1980s, according to a sociological study, 80.4 per cent
of the upper echelon of nomenklatura officials had come from family backgrounds
in the peasantry or unskilled labor, 3.6 per cent from skilled labor and 5.4 per cent
from ‘white-collar’ society. None were the offspring of professionals.5 Peasant
boys became urbanites in their early adulthood and, once having made the party
and state their career, quickly adopted the lifestyle of the middle classes and
nouveau riche that was characteristic of these classes in Russian society before
the revolution (a dynamic that came to the surface with remarkable clarity after
the collapse of communism in 1991).6 Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the
USSR from 1965 until 1982, was the embodiment of this majority group to be
found at the pinnacle of the nomenklatura.
Coherence and anti-intellectualism. Such social characteristics gave birth to a
peculiar bureaucratic ‘culture’, one that persisted as the regime recruited younger
cadres. The key requirements for nomenklatura work were pragmatism and, above
all, knowledge of ‘inside rules’. Education or even professional credentials were
unimportant. The older veterans instinctively distrusted younger outsiders of
more sophisticated social and cultural backgrounds. There was also a traditional
138 Reinterpreting the end of the Cold War
unspoken antagonism in this culture toward the party intellectuals, a remnant of
the period in the 1930s when Stalin’s crude recruits replaced the cosmopolitan,
Comintern-based cadres. This anti-intellectualism within the nomenklatura only
began to ease in the 1960s. Indeed, the later frenzy of intellectual status-seeking
even led some members of the ruling elite to covet doctoral degrees and publish
books. Still, at its social core, the nomenklatura abhorred intellectuals. Those in
the leadership who educated themselves and stood well above the rest of their col-
leagues in sophistication and intellectualism had to be extremely cautious and
avoid displaying their superiority. Yuri Andropov’s career was a telling example
of this phenomenon.
Morale and duplicity. As both archival documents and some memoirs have
revealed, cynicism and the lack of any inner sense of legitimacy was a striking
characteristic of Stalin’s inner circle. ‘Revolutionary legitimacy’ and socialist
romanticism practically vanished during Stalin’s rule. As Lavrenti Beriia’s son
recently recalled, ‘we complain today about the dual morality of our fellow citi-
zens. At that time [under Stalin] this was the norm in our leading circles.’7 The
editor of these memoirs observed that ‘the Soviet regime emerges as a regime of
blackmailers, a supremely hypocritical regime in which vice never stops paying
homage to virtue and in which baseness disguises itself as duty, cowardice as
altruism, treason as charity, sadism as efficiency, stupidity as patriotism’.8 The
rulers held on to power (equivalent, in their case, to hanging on to life itself) and
despised, feared and manipulated the Soviet people. This rottenness was firmly
ensconced within the secret, gossip-proof walls of the nomenklatura. From there,
though, it gradually spread out and infected elites at the lower echelons of power,
as well as society in general.
The impact of de-Stalinization. In pulling Stalin off the pedestal, Khrushchev
not only achieved his personal political goals but also sought to treat the system’s
infection, ameliorate Soviet life and refurbish the regime’s legitimacy in the eyes
of the Soviet people. However, de-Stalinization instigated from above immedi-
ately generated the growth of a movement from below that even frightened theprincipal architect of the entire process, that is, Khrushchev himself. The 20th
Party Congress in which Khrushchev denounced Stalin revived socialist romanti-
cism among young Soviets, and gave birth to new strands of idealism in public
life. It also destroyed the totalitarian model of culture created by Stalin. Soviet
cultural policies (accompanied by murderous campaigns of terror and purges) had
been the essential instrument of rule during Stalin’s reign, replacing democratic
politics.9 The first serious studies of this period have only recently been under-
taken.10 Nevertheless, it is already clear that these years contain important clues
to the further development of the Soviet Union, down to its ignominious demise.
In 1984 Dmitry Ustinov, speaking at the Politburo, insisted that Khrushchev had
caused more damage to the communist party and the Soviet state than had even
its most dangerous enemies.11
Militant imperialism. More than anything else, the Khrushchev years wit-
nessed the weakening of militant Soviet imperialism, rooted as it was in great
Russian chauvinism. Such militancy had been a mainstay of Stalinist culture
Elites, Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War 139
following World War II. Khrushchev integrated many aspects of this view in his
own Cold War behavior. But he was also a genuine believer in communist ideology
and in the international communist movement, regarding them not only as instru-
ments of Soviet imperial goals but as a goal in their own right. He attacked both
Stalin’s foreign policy and the imperial mentality that underlay it. At the same time,
he preached a return to ‘proletarian internationalism’ and ‘true Leninism’ and advo-
cated the large-scale, altruistic support of movements of national liberation all over
the world. He also did away with an important aspect of the country’s propaganda –
namely, the Soviet Union’s encirclement by enemies – which had been the corner-
stone of imperialist militancy. The result was the creation of a certain dichotomy
within the mental universe of the Soviet elite vis-à-vis Soviet foreign policy. In real-
ity, Soviet foreign policies remained wedded to a version of imperialism in which
the interests of the state took precedence over ideology. But the state’s propaganda
and cultural policies strove to obscure the machinations of a ‘great power’, hiding
it behind quite distinct values and notions antithetical to power politics.
Paradoxically, as the Soviet Union was becoming a real military superpower, its
elites were losing their militant imperialist edge. Ideas of convergence and integra-
tion with Europe, and with the West as a whole, can be traced to this time.
Khrushchev, for all the damage he caused to the Stalinist imperialist mentality,
remained most pragmatic in regards to power and stopped at nothing to halt the
erosion of Soviet positions in eastern Europe. Aside from his crude and cruel
background – he had participated in the mass purges – he was motivated by mem-
ories of World War II and the huge price that the Soviet Union paid for its victory
and position in the world.12 A similar background and set of memories guided
Brezhnev as well, together with the others who succeeded Khrushchev in 1964.
They ceased to be a factor when the older generation ceded power to Gorbachev
in 1985.
The evolution of key elite groups
Having made the above general observations, we should now turn to an examination
of three main groups within the elite Soviet power structure, which was located
below the top party nomenklatura, but which constituted the foundation of the Soviet
state.
Party and state managers (khoziaistvenniki)
The first and largest of these groups was primarily devoted to economic manage-
ment. It included the leaders of dozens of central ministries supervising the giant,
ever-growing Soviet economy. It also included numerous regional party secre-
taries from areas that included dense concentrations of important industrial enter-
prises, and who were in constant contact with Moscow’s central ministries. Yegor
Ligachev and Boris Yeltsin were representative of this group. Captains of the
military-industrial complex (MIC) constituted the group’s elite and its most effec-
tive vanguard. (MIC generated over 20 per cent of the Soviet GDP, half of it
140 Reinterpreting the end of the Cold War
intended for civilian use, by the mid-1980s.13) The military-industrial bureau-
cracy was one of the mainstays of the Soviet empire and, more specifically, of the
Union structures. Representatives of this group in Gorbachev’s entourage were
Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov and Politburo member and head of the Russian
Federation Vitaly Vorotnikov.
The interests, mutual ties and collective ethos of this group made it a powerful
force opposed to the regional separatism encouraged by local and ethnic party
elites. All the activities and interests of the khoziaistvenniki were oriented toward
Moscow and the central ministries. These cadres retained some qualities of the
old Stalinist elites: a ruthless pragmatism and the belief that the cudgel and tele-
phone call – the use of force, in general – would bring about the desired effects.
In retrospect, as has been argued in Russian scholarship, this segment of the
Soviet nomenklatura secretly yearned to transform itself from state managers into
capitalist owners and to shake off the shackles of the old centralized economy.
The remarkable transformation of party secretaries and communist ministers into
bankers and rich oligarchs under Yeltsin prompted one observer to suggest that
even under Gorbachev ‘the higher echelons of the party’ would have been ready
‘to send to Hell at any moment the whole of Marxism-Leninism, if such an act
would only help them preserve their hierarchical positions and continue their
careers’.14 Unfortunately, no reliable sociological and historical studies exist that
can confirm this conclusion. We can only surmise that there was a concentration
of pragmatically oriented persons in this group who entertained such ideas in a
dormant, passive form. They began to act when the system began to crumble from
the top down. Still, the available evidence reveals that, by the mid-1980s, a bulk
of the ‘managerial’ elites were still collectivist-minded and thoroughly ‘socialistic’.
The majority sincerely believed that the system should and could be reformed. In
this respect, they regarded the failure to implement economic reforms in the 1960s
as a grave mistake.
This group also lacked the coherence, sophistication and will to act as a polit-
ical lobby. Being managers par excellence, busy with everyday crises and strug-
gling within the dire straits of the ‘socialist economy’, most members of this
group had no time for political intrigues, let alone for developing a political con-
science. Paradoxically, even those regional party secretaries who were supposed
to be active in regional politics were lacking any political experience or talent
(Yegor Ligachev comes to mind again). When political reforms began to be insti-
tuted, many of these ‘managers’ quickly lost power to a new class of ‘democratic’
politicians who were charismatic and populistic, and who neither knew how the
Soviet economy worked nor cared to learn.
Power bureaucracies (siliviki)
The second large and important group within the Soviet ruling structure consisted
of ‘power ministers’ (to adopt the vernacular in current use by the Russian news-
papers). This included the KGB, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs and the Ministry of External Trade. Since Stalin, these bureaucracies were
Elites, Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War 141
the main receptacle and generator of militant imperialism and great power
sentiment. After World War II, the victorious Soviet military represented the
single most powerful group in the country, a fact that even Stalin had to take into
account. The Kremlin rulers had to rely on the military in order to crush the power
of Beriia’s secret police in 1953.Marshal Georgi Zhukov, being the most popular
figure within this group, was punished twice for his prominence. First, he was
semi-exiled by Stalin. Then, in 1957, he was demoted by Khrushchev. The top
party nomenklatura feared ‘Bonapartism’ among the military and kept them at
arm’s length from politics, while also trying to satisfy all their demands. After
1976 the head of the Ministry of Defense was a non-military personage, an archi-
tect of the MIC, Dmitry Ustinov. He succeeded in bringing the army’s top brass
to stand at attention as the Politburo issued its political orders. This included the
invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, which provoked disagreement within
the ranks. In 1987 Gorbachev carried out a large pre-emptive purge designed to
intimidate the military, but the military hierarchy had long since consented to
serve as an instrument in the hands of the party leadership. Marshal Sergei
Akhromeyev was an example of this.
The KGB was, in a sense, the watchdog and the most vital organ of the Soviet
state. The esprit de corps within KGB ranks was always strong; it was as close to
resembling a Teutonic Order as Stalin had once wanted the entire party to be. Yet,
the KGB was created in 1954 to replace the secret police that had aided Stalin in
keeping everyone in check, including the party, and that then had to be crushed.
Khrushchev was determined to bring secret police under the heel of the party
nomenklatura, introducing into the KGB a new group of Young Communist func-
tionaries, including Alexander Shepilov and Vladimir Semichastny, in order to
achieve that goal. This new blood had political experience and strong ideological
convictions, and aspired, in its way, to become a Soviet version of the ‘Young
Turks’. They despised the mass of crude, unsophisticated party nomenklatura and
believed that they knew better how to rule the Soviet Union.15 They helped to get
rid of Khrushchev, but then the new party leadership, sensing the danger that orig-
inated from this group, sent it into retirement. In 1967 Brezhnev appointed his
loyalist Yuri Andropov to chair the KGB.
Andropov’s chairmanship became, in many ways, the golden era of the KGB.
The organization expanded and became involved in virtually all aspects of the
economic, social and cultural policies of the USSR. However, this came at the
price of political domestication and tight ideological party control. As in the case
of the army, the top political leadership succeeded in turning the KGB’s Teutonic
Order into a pliant instrument. By the end of Brezhnev’s rule, the KGB was the
least corrupt of the Soviet power elites. There were many Andropov appointees,
among them his deputy Vladimir Kryuchkov, who were hardened Cold Warriors
and orthodox ideologues. At the same time, even in the KGB the spirit of impe-
rialist militancy was clearly on the wane. The long-time political and moral
stigma affixed to the KGB by de-Stalinization had a powerful impact on its
cadres. There was a deficit of political experience within its ranks, together with
a lack of will for power and the absence of a culture of risk taking. The head of
142 Reinterpreting the end of the Cold War
the department of analysis within the intelligence section later recalled that ‘there
was a widespread feeling among KGB officers and generals that they belonged to
the second class. They were never brought to be policy creators – they just
implemented policies.’ While the KGB could, in theory, become a vanguard of
reformers from the top, in practice the organization remained on the sidelines,
becoming increasingly irrelevant.16
The Foreign Ministry and the Foreign Trade Ministry had no power base com-
parable to the army and the KGB. These bureaucracies, however, defended Soviet
state and economic interests abroad, representing other pillars of Soviet imperial-
ism. The leadership of Molotov and Andrei Gromyko meant that numerous
cohorts of Soviet diplomats looked to traditional tsarist imperial history for inspi-
ration. This also meant that the majority of the diplomatic corps operated in an
atmosphere of total and unthinking obedience. Soviet diplomats were notorious
for their lack of initiative and courage.
At the same time, Khrushchev’s experiments and ‘the struggle for peace and
disarmament’ spawned a new and important segment of these bureaucracies:
arms-control negotiators. Like most of their colleagues, arms-control negotiators
played Cold War games. However, they became increasingly disillusioned
with Soviet foreign policy goals and behavior. They developed an affinity to
their Western counterparts and developed a distinct mentality – more liberal and
compromise-oriented – that set them off in stark contrast to their colleagues at
home.17
The ebb and flow of the Cold War had a powerful effect on Soviet power elites.
They were the first to face the Western adversary. But they were also the first to
confront the truth about Soviet inferiority and Western superiority in the eco-
nomic and social spheres. In the early 1960s and even in the 1970s, the anti-US
struggle over the Third World generated powerful impulses and contributed to a
strengthening of a militantly imperialist ideology in the ranks of the KGB and
among other Soviet representatives abroad. In fact, they functioned like a light
cavalry unit sent out on a mission against their enemies in the intoxicating atmos-
phere of a new Great Game.18 In contrast, the years of détente and of expanding
Soviet economic contacts abroad resulted in a growing number of comfortable
appointments for bureaucrats, stimulated corruption and increased the exposure
of representatives of this group to high material living standards. Many continued
to pose as staunch defenders of the Soviet empire, but they preferred to do so in
the well-appointed circumstances of Geneva, Paris or New York rather than at
home. There was a growing number of Western ‘agents of influence’ at work
within the ranks of Soviet power elites during the 1970s, a process directly related
to decay at home and a growing disillusionment with the prospects of the Soviet
way of life.
Intellectual advisers (‘shestidesyatniki’)
A third and most volatile group within the Soviet power elites was the small
intellectual-professional component of the Soviet power elites. Inherently marginal,
Elites, Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War 143
it continued to grow and gain ground during the 1970s and the first half of the
1980s. Of special ideological significance, in historical hindsight, were those who
called themselves ‘shestidesyatniki’, or the 1960s generation. They responded to
Khrushchev’s call in 1956 for the renovation of socialism and the dismantling of
Stalinist structures. These persons made their career in the analytical divisions
(outside of the intelligence community) as well as in the propaganda and cultural
structures of the central party apparat. In a certain sense, they could be consid-
ered the inheritors of the purged cosmopolitan cadres of the Comintern era. Many
came with politically ‘acceptable’ social backgrounds and experience in World
War II, together with university diplomas or with degrees from the Party
Academy of Social Sciences. From the late 1950s this group identified socially
and culturally with intellectual and artistic circles in Moscow and other large
urban centers. They also felt an affinity to the intellectual elite of the MIC and its
privileged ‘open’ branches, think tanks and research centers. In addition to their
historical self-definition, the shestidesyatniki also defined themselves as a ‘Soviet
intelligentsia’ and imbibed important cultural and spiritual influences from the
de-Stalinization era. They worked their way up the power system in the belief that
a series of ‘thaws’, that is, reformist periods, would melt Stalinist totalitarianism
and make it possible to give Soviet socialism a ‘human face’. One could include
among this cadre Georgy Shakhnazarov, Anatoly Chernyaev, Vadim Medvedev,
Feodor Burlatsky, OlegBogomolov, Len Karpinsky, Alexander Bovin and Georgy
Arbatov.19
The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was another pivotal movement
in the evolution of the shestidesyatniki. In the years preceding the invasion many
had worked in Prague for the journal of the international communist movement,
Issues of Peace and Socialism. Foreign and Soviet ‘comrades’ had freely traded
ideas and information and read any book they liked in Prague. Chernyaev recalled
the time he spent there as the period in which he managed ‘to shed his Soviet
skin’, a transformation that included not only intellectual but psychological
expressions as well.20 Many persons who later achieved prominence as political
advisers or journalists were graduates of the Prague ‘school’. The Prague Spring
and its repression by the Soviets threw this group into an existential crisis.21 They
lost all their illusions regarding the possible peaceful evolution of the Soviet
regime into a modern reformist technocracy. The shestidesyatniki, according to
one of them, ‘did not betray their convictions, but put up with the idea that they
would never see political freedom in their land’.22
Moscow of the late Brezhnev years resembled Rome on the eve of Luther. Any
smatterings of naive faith and idealism were quickly drowned in the sewers of
cynicism. Fresh, unspoiled persons still arrived from the provinces, but they grad-
ually lost their soul in the Soviet capital. At the same time, the city experienced
an intense and diverse cultural ferment. The shestidesyatniki were a part of this
ideological excitement that ranged from social democracy, to monarchy, to eso-
teric cults. In the atmosphere of détente with the West the ruling party and its
watchdog, the KGB, were rather passive and tolerant of these trends, as long
as there were no attempts to disseminate and propagate ideas that threatened
144 Reinterpreting the end of the Cold War
stability. High-placed intellectuals benefited dramatically from the rapid
expansion of personal ties and relationships. Think tanks specializing in contacts
with the outside world flourished, among them the IMEMO, the Institute for US
and Canada Studies, the Institute of Africa, the Institute of Latin America, the
Institute of Economy of World Socialist Systems, the Institute of World Workers
Movement, etc. These organizations became the institutional base for the suc-
cessful shestidesyatniki, a launching pad for their travels ‘in and out of power
structures’.
The political influence of intellectual advisers should not be exaggerated. They
remained on the margins of the Soviet elite structures. What made the shestidesy-
atniki truly significant, however, was the moral and intellectual ‘oases’ they pro-
vided inside the increasingly stagnant regime. In the years when the Soviet Union
fell into neglect and mismanagement, they created a much-desired middle ground
between open dissent and unprincipled conformism. At the same time, they
lacked the will and motivation to become political players. Psychologically, they
were closer to Russian Mensheviks than to Bolsheviks. They preferred to travel
‘in and out of power’ structures, remaining in certain respects romantics of power
to the end.
Westernism and ‘agents of influence’
After the end of the Cold War, numerous shell-shocked Soviet functionaries were
at a loss to explain why so many of their colleagues, including diplomats and even
KGB officials, enthusiastically supported reconciliation with the former enemy.
They looked upon such a fervent, nearly euphoric, Westernism as a form of trea-
son. Talk about ‘hidden enemies’ and Western ‘agents of influence’ began to be
heard, both in public discourse and in informal conversations.
It should be noted here that this Westernism so much in evidence in the late
1980s and early 1990s was a mass psychological phenomenon that reflected the
revolutionary changes then flooding over the Soviet Union. At the same time, the
roots of this phenomenon were to be found in the 1940s, in the long-term trend of
a growing philo-Westernism amongst the educated strata of Soviet society, as well
as within the key elites. The complex causes of this trend lie beyond the scope of
the present chapter.23 Two specific moments, however, require special mention.
The first was an increase in the economic and psychological dependence of
Soviet elites on the West as they strove for greater comfort and status. The mate-
rial benefits of Western civilization attracted highly placed Soviet visitors to
European countries and the United States. Even the most cynical among them were
thrilled by what they saw in the West, and came back convinced that the Soviet
Union would reach this same high level of material culture. The more corrupt and
status-conscious the Soviet nomenklatura became, the greater its dependence on
Western goods – either imported, purchased during highly valued trips abroad or
brought as ‘souvenirs’ by innumerable tourists and business partners.
The second factor worthy of mention here was the gnawing realization that the
race against the West, and in particular against the US economy, had been lost. In
Elites, Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War 145
the late 1950s Krushchev had pledged ‘to catch up and surpass’ the United States
economically. By so doing, he actually made comparison between the Soviet
Union and the United States compulsory; it became a permanent matrix in the
public mind. The dawning understanding in the 1970s that while the Soviet Union
could produce more cement and metal than the US economy it would lag behind
in the high-tech sector was experienced as a thunderbolt by younger, more roman-
tic Soviet officials. They also saw that the German and Japanese economies,
which had been bombed into dust during World War II, were now emerging as
economic leaders, far surpassing the Soviet economy in productivity, efficiency
and innovation. Finally, these officials were forced to recognize that Asia’s ‘small
dragons’ (South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore) evidenced a pace of growth and
innovative drive that also left the Soviets behind.
The result was a frustration with the unreconstructed domestic regime and the
lack of reform. This situation also revived an atavistic Russian doom-and-gloom
mentality, a soul-searching provoked by the purported inherent backwardness of
Russian society and the Russian people. The inverse result of this process was a
growing emulation, obsession and envy displayed towards the developed Western
societies, one verging on Hassliebe towards the United States.
In addition, there was a ‘benign power’ at work within Western culture, and
what could be termed ‘the glamour of Western civilization’, that exercised influ-
ence on Soviet elites, particularly on the younger cohorts. This ‘benign power’
ranged from admiration for technological progress to a love for Western music
that reached millions of Soviet households by means of international radio
and the spread of tape recorders. In the words of Gorbachev’s interpreter, ‘I am
sure that the impact of the Beatles on the generation of young Soviets in the 1960s
will one day be the object of studies. We knew their songs by heart.’24
The intellectual trends affecting the shestidesyatniki all pointed toward a recon-
ciliation with Western democracies as the only alternative to the deadlock of the Cold
War and the terrible danger of nuclear war. Many shestidesyatniki cherished hopes
in the mid-1940s that Soviet cooperation with the Western democracies would force
Stalin to change his ways and alter the regime. Even 30 or 40 years later they were
still hoping to turn back the Iron Curtain and recycle the ‘missed opportunities’
dating from the years before the Cold War. The result of their convictions, as Robert
English has described in his extensive study, was ‘the emergence of a global outlook’.
Embattling a military xenophobic imperialism and Russian chauvinism that
remained at the mental core of other major groups of Soviet elites, shestidesyatnikipromoted liberal (‘universal humanist’) values, the gradual amelioration of social
norms and their study by the social sciences, cultural and intellectual rapprochement
and political reconciliation with the West, the impossibility of war in a nuclear age,
etc. No wonder, then, that the academic think tanks led by shestidesyatniki quickly
emerged as the target of fierce attacks by xenophobes and Russian chauvinists who
accused them of being hotbeds of Westernism and cosmopolitanism.25
It would be preposterous to depict those affected by Westernization as a ‘fifth
column’ in the last years of the Cold War. The motives and interests of Westernizers
were highly varied, ranging from the intellectual and sublime to the mercantile
146 Reinterpreting the end of the Cold War
and venal. Interest in and even sympathy for the West were broad phenomena, as
complex and diverse as the broad-based sympathy for Soviet Russia that was
common in the West. During the 1930s thousands of intellectuals and highly
placed officials in Western democracies supported reconciliation and friendship
with the Soviet Union. Half a century later the tide had changed. It was now time
for Soviet officials, from the romantics to the pragmatists, to mentally defect to
the West. Western intelligence services reaped their harvest of agents in the
process, but this was not what helped the West to prevail in the Cold War. The
broader process of growing Westernism and dependence on the West, however,
was a major factor in the Cold War’s denouement.
Gorbachev: the significance of a fateful historical personality
Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, that energetic, handsome man with sparkling eyes
and a charming smile, ‘did more than anyone else to end the Cold War between
East and West’, asserts British political scientist Archie Brown in his seminal
study, The Gorbachev Factor. Yet, surprisingly, in discussing the reasons that
informed Gorbachev’s policies, Brown does not focus on the character and per-
sonal traits of the last Soviet leader: Gorbachev is a ‘factor’ in his study, not a
human being of flesh and spirit.26
Perhaps this reticence to address Gorbachev the person can be excused. It is,
indeed, very difficult to write about a living historical personality. Our very prox-
imity warps our vision. But is it possible to evaluate recent history without per-
sonally analyzing a person who so dramatically influenced its course? It is worth
quoting in this context Anatoly Chernyaev, the most loyal and supportive of
Gorbachev’s assistants. Gorbachev, he claims, ‘was not “a great man” as far as a
set of personal qualities was concerned’. But he ‘fulfilled a great mission’, and
that is ‘more important for history’.27 A more critical Dmitry Volkogonov pro-
vides another but no less remarkable estimate: Gorbachev ‘is a person of great
mind, but with a weak character. Without this paradox of personality it is hard
to understand him as a historical actor.’ Volkogonov writes that the ‘intellect,
feelings and will of Gorbachev’ left a unique imprint on the Soviet transition.28
In the years following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet
Union, Gorbachev and his loyalists sought to present their actions as a major effort
at ‘reformation’ of the Soviet Union: an attempt to make Soviet society free and
democratic. Gorbachev himself stresses the role of new ideas, of ‘new thinking’.
He recently presented himself as having been a reformer squeezed between the
reactionary nomenklatura and the irresponsible, demagogical, radical forces of
the nationalist and pseudo-liberal ‘right’.29
However, even Gorbachev’s friends note that he systematically avoids most of
the important issues. Above all, there is the question about his policies, both for-
eign and domestic, in 1987–88. Initially, Gorbachev’s statesmanship was based on
a pragmatic realpolitik rather than on the abstract principles he would later adopt.
When Margaret Thatcher said in 1984 that one could do business with Gorbachev,
she was particularly impressed with his citation of Lord Palmerston on the value
Elites, Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War 147
of ‘permanent interests’.30 In 1985–87 Gorbachev’s foreign policy corresponded
to such a value. Soviet proposals for arms control, trust and the reduction of
strategic arsenals were prudent and were supported at home and abroad. Even
severe critics of other aspects of Gorbachev’s administration recall with high
regard the arms talks he held with the United States, together with their results.31
After 1987, however, Gorbachev forgot Palmerston’s dictum. His policies were
hasty and improvised and he became imbued with a messianic spirit. In mid-1987
Gorbachev wrote a book called Perestroika for our Country and the Entire World.
It contained a universalistic message, a vision of international relations based on
a new, just and democratic world order in which the USSR would play a key role
and the United Nations would reign supreme. In a word, Gorbachev replaced one
messianic ‘revolutionary-imperial’ idea of communism with another messianic
idea ‘that perestroika in the USSR was only a part of some kind of global
perestroika, the birth of a new world order’.32
This new ideological basis for his foreign policy did not necessarily include an
absolute rejection of the use of force and the projection of power in one form or
another. Yet, in his shift in ‘paradigm’, Gorbachev not only rejected communist
tenets of ‘class struggle’ but post-Stalinist imperialist realpolitik as well. While
the collapse of the Soviets’ ‘eastern European empire’ was inevitable, it is not
clear why Gorbachev chose the course of absolute non-intervention in eastern
European affairs that he did. It was as if he, like Pilate, wanted to wash his hands
of the whole business. After all, Gorbachev could have sought to promote posi-
tive change in eastern Europe. Instead, he simply presided as a benign observer
over the rapid dissolution of the Soviet ‘empire’.
Later, in 1989–90, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze took bold steps towards
rapprochement with the United States. Again, however, these included some
bizarre developments. US officials continued to pursue prudent, ‘realist’ objec-
tives while their Soviet counterparts talked about friendship and partnership.
Meanwhile, the latter lagged behind in formulating positions that would secure
the Soviet Union a place in the fast-changing world. Gorbachev and Soviet diplo-
macy were far behind events – and German–US statecraft – on the most impor-
tant security issue of the day, namely, the reunification of Germany. They failed
to obtain from either the West German or the US leadership any guarantees for
Soviet security and the non-expansion of NATO in the new Europe.33
If one accepts his reasoning, Gorbachev sacrificed the Soviet Union’s external
empire in the name of reforms and ‘new thinking’ at home. But his domestic
record presents a depressing picture of incoherence, empty declarations and gross
economic errors (beginning with the infamous ‘anti-alcoholic’ campaign). After
three years of Gorbachev’s leadership, the elites and society at large grew disillu-
sioned and frustrated with the possibility of improving their lot by means of con-
certed action by the party leadership and the state. The economic, financial and
state crisis that already afflicted the Soviet Union acquired catastrophic propor-
tions two or three years after Gorbachev came to power.34 Instead of producing
an ‘acceleration’ of the Soviet economy, as he proclaimed he would do in 1986,
Gorbachev actually accelerated economic crisis.
148 Reinterpreting the end of the Cold War
He and his advisers later claimed that they tried every possible means to reform
the economy in the extant political framework, reaching the conclusion that it
could only be changed through political reforms. It seems that by 1987 they had
firmly resolved that the old nomenklatura was not only incapable of changing, but
generally constituted an insurmountable roadblockto reform.35 In an attempt to
remove this roadblock, Gorbachev sought to encourage the development of new
political forces and movements, while gradually diminishing the power of the
party and of centralized state structures. However, he chose a terribly risky and
dangerous path for doing this. Though he put political reforms on the fast track,
he continued to delay in creating institutions of a market economy. His actions
encouraged a very rapid dismantling of the system and of the communist ideol-
ogy that provided its legitimacy. Political reforms did not pave the way for well-
managed and gradual economic transformation. Instead, they put the Soviet
Union – as a state and an economy – on the skids. Gorbachev’s ‘remedies’ – his
‘new thinking’ – were killing the already sick patient.36 By 1989 the Soviet lead-
ership was already engulfed in such a severe domestic crisis that it was no longer
capable of carrying out any measured foreign policy. By early 1990 the Soviet
Union lost its external empire, together with its ability to negotiate as an equal
partner with the United States. By early 1991 the Soviet Union was financially
bankrupt, as the entire world knew.37
Ten years after losing power, Gorbachev himself agreed in a candid discussion
that there had been ‘a lot of naivety and utopianism’ in his actions. But he
adamantly stuck to his ideals of ‘new thinking’. He admitted that he deliberately
ran the risk of political destabilization after 1988 but that this was necessary.
Radical political reforms were ‘deliberately designed’ to ‘wake up the [Soviet]
people’. Otherwise, he said, ‘we would have shared the fate of Khrushchev. Even
after we introduced new fresh forces into the already liberated structures – the
party nomenklatura set a goal . . . through plenums to remove the General Secretary
because he intended to bury its privileges.’38
In the end, domestic crisis interfered with Gorbachev’s attempts to end the Cold
War. Again, it was the reverse of his original intent to use domestic reforms to
shore up Soviet negotiating positions in a way that would allow the USSR to exit
the Cold War loop with honor. A close aide to Foreign Minister Shevardnadze
later asserted that, after mid-1988,
when we encountered domestic difficulties, we began to realize that we
would be able to stay afloat for a while and even to preserve the status of a
great power only if we could lean on the United States. We felt that if we had
stepped away from the US, we would have been pushed aside. We had to be
as close as possible to the United States.39
It is hard to escape the conclusion that the developments of 1985–89, which
brought an end to the Soviet external empire in eastern Europe and put the Soviet
Union itself on the road towards extinction, were not inevitable. In this regard, Archie
Brown’s remarks about Gorbachev’s impact sound almost like an understatement.
Elites, Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War 149
It would not be an exaggeration to compare Gorbachev to a David who killed
the Goliath of the Cold War, except that his main casualty was another giant, the
Soviet Union.
Several features of Gorbachev’s statesmanship and personality stand out in
hindsight.
Gorbachev and ideas: a belated ‘shestidesyatnik’. Gorbachev’s election to the
post of General Secretary was, to some extent, the result of pressure on the
Politburo from the party elites. There was a general consensus that under the young,
charming leader things would go better for the country. Initially, Gorbachev acted
as a skillful mediator who succeeded in satisfying all the key elites. After 1987,
however, he embarked on a radical course that required a sophisticated intellectual
and moral foundation, a new frontier. As time passes and our perspective of events
broadens, the role of the ‘new thinking’ vis-à-vis the motivations and the self-image
of Gorbachev and the reformers surrounding him looms ever larger. For most states-
men ideas are tools. To understand their impact on history one must examine the
ways in which ideas are molded and manipulated by the human agents who espouse
them. In Gorbachev’s case, he clearly overreached himself in attempting to shape
Soviet realities on the basis of the ideas contained in the ‘new thinking’.
There are few, if any, precedents in history for a leader of a huge ailing state to
willingly risk the geopolitical positions of a great power and the very foundations
of his political position for the sake of a moral global project. Even Lenin,
Gorbachev’s hero, compromised away the project of ‘world revolution’ in 1918 in
order to stay in power.
Gorbachev’s reliance on the ‘intelligentsia’and on his intellectual advisers in des-
perately searching for ideas and recipes for action was striking. He had no perma-
nent ‘team’ but, rather, three teams who worked for him. One of these was the
Politburo and the leaders of key power structures. The other two consisted of intel-
lectuals. One circle, later transformed into the Presidential Council, included the
Soviet intellectual and artistic establishment (the tvorcheskaia intelligentsiia). The
other, in the words of one of its members, was ‘a narrow circle of like-minded asso-
ciates, sort of a brain trust, where the ideas of reform grew and got polished, where
his speeches and documents got written’.40 This third team included Alexander
Yakovlev, Vadim Medvedev, Anatoly Chernyaev and Georgy Shakhnazarov. A
majority of this circle were shestidesyatniki themselves or those who belonged to
that milieu.
It should be noted that Gorbachev himself was not a shestidesyatnik by back-
ground. He and several of his biographers later exaggerated the impact of 
de-Stalinization and the intellectual currents that shaped the shestidesyatniki on
Gorbachev’s life. However, in contrast to them, Gorbachev was a quintessential
career politician who worked his way up the party ladder with impressive astute-
ness, consistently honing his faculties of cynical, calculated manipulation.
Indeed, some of those who worked with him before and after he became General
Secretary were struck by his cold-hearted use of the art of power intrigue.
Still, Gorbachev always distinguished himself from other party cadres in two
ways: by his pretensions at intellectualism and by his valuation of the high moral
150 Reinterpreting the end of the Cold War
ground. Among the increasingly lax and corrupt corps of younger party secretaries,
Gorbachev stood out as the one who read serious books, refrained from drinking
and maintained strict family values. While this seriousness, together with his
manipulative streak, his charm and his other ‘visages’, makes Gorbachev a
complex subject for observers to describe, it also helped to build a bridge between
the party politician and those intellectual advisers who survived the Brezhnev
era. Seasoned shestidesyatniki were struck by Gorbachev’s intellectual curiosity
and, being themselves no shining example of morality in private or public life,
were taken in by his relative moral purity, what almost seemed to some to be his
naivety.
The transformation of Gorbachev from the cautious, prudent ‘realist’ following
in the footsteps of his predecessor, Andropov, into the leader of political and ide-
ological ‘reformation’ made him into a hero of the narrow circle of shestidesyat-
niki who assisted him. At some level, Gorbachev assumed the mantle of a
politician who assumed power in order to realize the dreams and ideas of the
shestidesyatniki. Gorbachev’s willingness after his fall from power to continue to
associate himself with this segment of the Soviet elites and the historical tradition
they represented was not entirely opportunistic. It reflected, rather, an important
aspect of Gorbachev’s personality. At some point in the late 1980s, it can be said,
he became ‘a belated shestidesyatnik’: a party apparatchik who rose above the
interests of the nomenklatura for the sake of the ideas of freedom, democracy and
reform. As will be discussed below, Gorbachevsometimes went further than
many of the shestidesyatniki themselves wanted or recommended, most notably
in his rejection of militant imperialism and the use of force in its defense, and in
his pursuit of rapprochement with the West. Gorbachev’s belief in the reforma-
bility of Soviet socialism against all odds became legendary. Like most of the
early shestidesyatniki, Gorbachev looked to Lenin as his role model, doing so as
late as 1989. He found in Lenin not only the master of political intrigues, charac-
terized by a ruthless, stop-at-nothing focus on power. Lenin no less represented
values of intellectual creativity, optimism and an all-conquering will in the midst
of social and political chaos. Gorbachev confessed to Chernyaev as late as early
1989 that he held imaginary conversations with Lenin in which he asked the latter
for advice.41
The Soviet leader was by no means the only one undergoing a transformation
from Saul the apparatchik into Paul the missionary. (One could also include
Alexander Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze in this list.) But his conversion
played a most important role in Russian and world history.
Ad hoc-ism and procrastination. Friends and foes alike debate Gorbachev’s
personal abilities in the arenas of statesmanship and state management. They
nearly all emphasize his ‘ad hoc-ism’, his congenital lack of a long-range strate-
gic plan and his aversion to the practical details of governance. They all recognize
that perestroika had no blueprint and that ‘new thinking’ was a vague slogan rather
than a practical guide for reforms. Gorbachev’s favorite phrases, beside ‘unpre-
dictability’, were ‘let processes develop’ and ‘processes are on the run’ ( protsessi
poshli). In the opinion of one of his supporters, this attitude was a ramification of
Elites, Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War 151
his excessively optimistic view of people, particularly of the Soviet people. ‘It
always seemed to him that people could not help but be glad to organize their own
life for themselves.’42 He had little doubt but that it would be best just to wait and
watch while ‘processes’ ran their course and provided the most sensible outcome.
Even sympathizers admit that this trait contributed to Gorbachev’s chronic
inability to chart a practical course for the state apparat, to carry out a sustained
and planned-out program of action and to prevent psychological disarray and ide-
ological breakdown in society at large. Political memoirs by his admirers are
replete with accounts of Gorbachev’s frustration and nagging doubts about it.43
Gorbachev, they admit, failed to bring meaningful economic reforms when it was
still possible to undertake such initiatives. He ruined the state finances in
1985–86 by launching a disastrous anti-alcoholism campaign that might have cost
up to 100 billion rubles within a few years. He did this at the same time that it
was decided to invest approximately 200 billion rubles in retooling the machin-
ery of key industries. But Gorbachev was unable to switch economic priorities
from numerical growth to qualitative restructuring. Instead, he proclaimed a
course of ‘acceleration’ and wed it to unrealistic tempos of economic growth.44
Even in foreign policy, where he maintained a relatively steady course from 1985
to 1987, there were signs of ad hoc-ism and delays in crucial decisions.
Gorbachev allowed the Brezhnev–Andropov–Gromyko war in Afghanistan to
become ‘Gorbachev’s war’. And he let Yeltsin assume the political initiative in
breaking with the old discredited political order.45
His supporters have attempted to put the best possible spin on this feature of
Gorbachev’s statesmanship. They argue that, since nobody knew how to trans-
form a ‘totalitarian’ country, it could only be done by trial and error. In the words
of one, ‘the work that Gorbachev did could only have been done without accu-
rately perceiving all its complexity and danger. If he had started to compute
everything, to think through various alternatives in his head, he simply could
never have undertaken it.’46 Such a retrospective judgment of Gorbachev’s abili-
ties is based on the assumption that no one could have reformed the old system,
that it had to be destroyed one way or another. Gorbachev, however, presented and
continues to present himself as a reformer rather than a destroyer of the Soviet
Union. What he and his admirers do not want to admit is that Gorbachev’s ad hoc-
ism and grave errors, whose consequences were anticipated even at the time by
the more astute observers, contributed significantly to Soviet collapse.
As a statesman, Gorbachev was the antithesis of Joseph Stalin. According to
those who intimately knew the latter’s mode of operation, Stalin had an amazing
ability to calculate all his words and actions ahead of time. According to the
recollections of Beriia’s son,
Stalin was supremely intelligent. He took all his decisions after carefully
weighing them. He never improvised. He always had ready-made plans
which he carried out point by point. Every one of his actions formed part of
a long-term scheme which was to enable him to attain a particular aim at a
particular moment.47
152 Reinterpreting the end of the Cold War
While this description might be slightly exaggerated, the historical evidence, and
in particular the way Stalin planned and implemented his foreign policy, gener-
ally supports it. Gorbachev’s intelligence and mode of operation were diametri-
cally opposed. He never thought, either systemically or consistently, about state
policies and he never followed up in implementing them as he originally intended.
After 1988, in particular, he began to act in haste, without knowing where his ini-
tiatives would take him and the country he was leading. By the spring of 1989 it
became obvious, even to his closest associates, that Gorbachev was irreversibly
losing control of both foreign and domestic events. Anatoly Chernyaev wrote in
his diary in May 1989, in anguish and amazement:
Inside me depression and alarm are growing, the sense of crisis of the
Gorbachevian Idea. He is prepared to go far. But what does it mean? His
favorite catchword is ‘unpredictability’. But most likely we will come to a
collapse of the state and something like chaos.48
Stalin, particularly once the Soviet Union became a world empire, filled two
roles: that of the leader of an internationalist revolutionary movement and that of
the Russian tsar. The second role was, credibly, a central aspect of his ‘self-
image’. Gorbachev, wittingly or unwittingly, stepped into the shoes of Russian
tsars. On the basis of all his personal inclinations, he intended to be a kind, good
tsar. But it is difficult to fit Gorbachev into this category.49 His priorities were not
based on the power, prestige and stability of the state. His first priority, as already
mentioned, was to construct a global world order based on ‘new thinking’. This
puts Gorbachev, at least on his own terms, in the ranks of such twentieth-century
figures as Woodrow Wilson, Mahatma Gandhi and other prophets of universalism.
None of them excelled as state-builders and statesmen.
Among numerous examples of Gorbachev’s ad hoc-ism, one of the most strik-
ing was his attitude towards the collapse of the Wall and the status quo in
Germany. Hostile to the leader of the GDR, Erich Honecker, whom he considered
a retrograde and a fool, Gorbachev typically removed himself from events in that
country, which was the key to the Soviet military and political role in Europe.
Only the obligation to go to Berlin for celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the
GDR forced Gorbachev to involve himself in the unfolding crisis.50 Just a few
days before the fall of the Wall, Gorbachev’s foreign policy assistant enthused in
his private diary:
A total dismantling of socialism as a world phenomenon has been taking
place. This may be inevitable and good. For this is a reunification of mankind
on the basis of common sense. And a common fellow from Stavropol
[i.e. Gorbachev]set this process in motion.51
We may never learn the actual thoughts of Gorbachev at this moment, but his visit
to Berlin made it perfectly clear to him that revolution was brewing and that
Honecker’s days were numbered. And yet he did nothing but offer Delphic and
Elites, Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War 153
cryptic exhortations. Soviet representatives in the GDR were paralyzed by lack of
instructions. Politburo member Vitaly Vorotnikov recorded the first impressions
that Gorbachev shared with the Politburo upon his return from Berlin: ‘Honecker
does not comprehend the complex situation around him. The mood of the public
and [the party] is complicated. Our possible allies – Hans Modrow and Egon
Krenz.’ At the Politburo session on 12 October Gorbachev repeated the estimate
that a storm was brewing in the GDR. Yet, again, he neither proposed specific
measures nor discussed the situation’s possible implications for the USSR.52
Only on 16 October did Gorbachev begin to formulate a policy, doing so in
response to a messenger sent to Moscow by top GDR officials Willi Stoph, Krenz
and Erich Milke seeking Gorbachev’s support for the removal of Honecker. At the
time, Milke already believed it was too late for any transition. Instead of addressing
the entire Politburo, Gorbachev convened a conference in his office that included
Yakovlev, Medvedev, Kryuchkov, Ryzhkov, Shevardnadze and Vorotnikov. ‘The
issues are ripe and we must decide’, declared Gorbachev.
First, we must warn the FRG against interfering. We must get in touch with
the leaders of socialist countries after the [removal of Honecker]. The same
[is the case with the west] European countries. We must speak to Bush as
well – there could be nuances! Particularly, since the issue of German reuni-
fication would be on the agenda. [To clarify] their attitude. Their tactics. Our
military should behave calmly, without demonstrating [force].53
This episode underlines the strangely ad hoc nature of Soviet decision making
regarding the German question. The General Secretary, as Vorotnikov reported,
simply informed a small group of Politburo members of the situation. There was
no discussion of the issue. Representatives of the military were not present at the
meeting. Nor were experts on Germany. What is no less striking is Gorbachev’s
predisposition toward a reactive rather than a proactive approach to the GDR
crisis.
To a significant degree the same predisposition shaped Soviet diplomacy dur-
ing the following months of crucial bargaining and maneuvering that led to the
reunification of Germany. Gorbachev’s thinking and acting on this issue were
consistently a matter of too little, too late.54 Amazingly, at the moment of the col-
lapse of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev was distracted by other, mainly domestic
issues. As a councilor at the embassy recalls, ‘the entire leadership was busy and
nobody could find time for the GDR’.55
According to numerous witnesses, this might have been part of a general pat-
tern for Gorbachev’s political behavior. Ligachev believes that:
being too late, reacting too slowly to events, was one of the most character-
istic traits of Gorbachev’s policies. When some controversial things hap-
pened, Gorbachev often reacted with delay. My explanation is that he wanted
others to analyze what affected the society, was painful to the society. He
wanted a ripe fruit to fall onto his lap, the one he could pick up. But often it
154 Reinterpreting the end of the Cold War
was necessary to row against the tide. There were many instances in history
when the leader remained in the minority, but turned out to be right.
Gorbachev, unfortunately, lacked this quality.56
Georgy Shakhnazarov, who was in charge of eastern European affairs and a member
of Gorbachev’s entourage in 1988–89, called his boss a modern Fabius Cunctator, a
Roman politician notorious for his indecisiveness and procrastination.57
Aversion to the use of force. Gorbachev was the antithesis of Stalin, and, in fact,
of all his Soviet predecessors, in another way as well. He was organically, as well
as morally, uneasy with the use of force as an instrument of policy and states-
manship. The implications, for both the peaceful end of the Cold War and the
disintegration of the Soviet Union, were incalculable.
Former Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, for example, privately
referred to Gorbachev and his advisers as ‘Martians’ when talking of their igno-
rance of the rules of realpolitik. ‘I wonder how puzzled the US and other NATO
countries must be’, he confessed to his son. ‘It is a mystery for them why
Gorbachev and his friends in the Politburo cannot comprehend how to use force
and pressure in defending their state interests.’58 To be sure, Gorbachev was not
a visitor from Mars. He did, however, represent long-term trends within Soviet
society and amongst its elites, trends that were particularly pronounced among
educated youth and intellectuals. Anatol Lieven, a keen observer of Russia,
observed several years later that the social trend against militarism and violence
had been developing ever since Stalin’s death. This pointed, too, to the weakening
of the Soviet state and its controlling ideology. These attitudes, Lieven writes,
‘grew slowly through the last four decades of Soviet life’.59
It is clear that Gorbachev personified the reluctance to use force. This was for
him not so much a reasoned-out position based on experience as it was a funda-
mental aspect of his character. Non-violence was not only a genuine value
embraced by Gorbachev that lay at the foundation of his domestic and foreign
policies. It also reflected his personal ‘codes’. Gorbachev’s collaborators and
aides emphasize that ‘the avoidance of bloodshed was a constant concern of
Gorbachev’, that ‘for Gorbachev an unwillingness to shed blood was not only a
criterion but the condition of his involvement in politics’. Gorbachev, they
observe, was a man of indubitable personal courage. Yet, ‘by character he was a
man incapable not only of using dictatorial measures, but even of resorting to
hard-line administrative means’. ‘Harsh and dictatorial methods are not in the
character of Gorbachev.’The critics claim that Gorbachev ‘had no guts for blood’,
even when such steps were required by raison d’état.60
It is important to note that Gorbachev’s renunciation of force was not an
inevitable consequence of new thinking or democratic values. Liberals will use
force for liberal ends. A substantial number of liberals and former dissidents
believe that Gorbachev’s absolute rejection of force was a mistake and perhaps
not even moral. The liberal philosopher Grigory Pomerantz, for instance, praised
Gorbachev’s decision ‘to let go’ of eastern Europe. At the same time, however,
he accused Gorbachev of ‘let[ting] go the forces of destruction’– forces of
Elites, Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War 155
barbarism, ethnic genocide and chaos – in the south Caucasus, central Asia and
other regions of the Soviet Union. ‘The first duty of the state was to contain
chaos.’ Gorbachev’s inactivity, however, opened a Pandora’s box. Another critic,
Vladimir Lukin, noted: ‘Firmness [zhestkost] was necessary in such a country as
Russia, not to mention the Soviet Union.’61
As the Cold War was ending in Europe the first fissures began to appear in the
Soviet state. This was not a mere coincidence. Rather, in both cases, Gorbachev’s
approach – one that issued from his personality – played an indispensable role.
At the ideological level, the Soviet leader represented a clear-cut link between the
two goals of ending the Cold War and successfully transforming the Soviet
Union. One of the axioms of this link was the notion of non-violence, an expres-
sion of Gorbachev’s personal aversion to using force. After the tragedy in Tbilisi
in April 1989 (when Russian troops protecting the Georgian communist leader-
ship against a nationalist demonstration killed Georgian civilians), Gorbachev
declared a taboo on the use of forceeven though nationalist forces had begun to
break the country apart. He announced to the Politburo that ‘we have accepted
that even in foreign policy force is to no avail [nichego ne daiet]. So especially
internally – we cannot resort and will not resort to force.’62 Despite various set-
backs, Gorbachev adhered to this tenet with remarkable tenacity until his last day
in power.
Western politicians, particularly the US President George Bush and the US
Secretary of State James Baker, well understood this non-violent feature of
Gorbachev’s statesmanship and they successfully appealed to it. At Malta, for
instance, Bush suggested a gentlemen’s agreement to Gorbachev regarding
actions in the Baltic region, where popular movements were demanding complete
independence from the USSR. Bush’s suggestion violated a long-standing taboo
in US–Soviet relations, namely, interference in the ‘internal affairs’ of the other
superpower. However, Bush had found the correct approach. ‘I would like to have
the fullest understanding of your approach to the Baltics’, he said. ‘There should
be no setbacks here. Perhaps it would be better to discuss this issue in a confi-
dential way, since I would very much like to perceive the core of your thinking on
this extremely complicated issue.’ Since the internal question regarding the future
of the Baltics was raised in the context of Bush’s general interest in Gorbachev’s
‘new thinking’, and as an expression of concern to prevent setbacks in the
US–Soviet partnership for creating a new global order, Gorbachev readily agreed
to Bush’s approach. As a result, an understanding took shape by which the United
States would refrain from any attempts to help the Baltic nationalists while, in
return, Gorbachev would refrain from any use of force in dealing with the Baltic
problem.63
Gorbachev’s Westernism
In the opinion of his foreign admirers, Gorbachev was the first Soviet statesman
who acted almost like a Western politician, a phenomenon that, considering
Gorbachev’s background, they fail to comprehend. Indeed, in contrast to his
156 Reinterpreting the end of the Cold War
predecessors, Gorbachev was free of even the slightest tinge of xenophobia
and psychological hostility towards the West. In his first years in power, to
be sure, he continued to subscribe to standard Soviet political and ideological
stereotypes regarding Western countries, particularly those regarding the United
States. But even while he continued to treat Reagan, Kohl and their colleagues as
‘adversaries’, he began to dismantle the Iron Curtain, first allowing free contacts
with foreigners for the select group of establishment intellectuals and officials,64
and then opening the outside world (information and travel) to the rest of Soviet
society.
As Gorbachev’s sympathizers argue, this was not just a calculated policy of
‘showing Europe to Ivan’ and thus breaking the hold of obscurantism and isola-
tionism on the mentality of the Soviet people. Gorbachev’s Westernism reflected
a broader trend: a growing psychological dependency on the part of increasing
numbers within the Russian elites. ‘For all Soviet people, including the higher
echelons of the party’, an observer writes,
the West has always been an object of longing. Trips to the West were a most
important status symbol. There is nothing you can do about this; it is ‘in the
blood’, in the culture. It is obvious that such was to some extent the case of
the Gorbachevs.65
Critics look upon Gorbachev’s affinity with the West as an ominous omen.
They claim that Gorbachev’s stunning personal success among west European
and US audiences made his head swell. He began to place friendly relations with
foreign leaders ahead of ‘state interests’. Psychologically, they argue, Gorbachev
turned to the West for recognition and acceptance as his popularity at home began
to rapidly sink as a result of the growing social and political chaos. Soviet diplo-
mats Anatoly Dobrynin and Georgy Kornienko are particularly blunt in stating
that Gorbachev ‘frittered away the negotiating potential of the Soviet state’ in
exchange for the ephemeral popularity and good will of Western statesmen. They
sketch a gloomy picture of how the aim of reaching an understanding with the
West degenerated, by means of Gorbachev’s behavior, into the General Secretary’s
psychological and later political dependence on the West. In Dobrynin’s opinion,
Western statesmen profited from Gorbachev’s weaknesses. After 1988 Gorbachev
was in a hurry to end the Cold War because he had a personal need to compen-
sate for his declining prospects at home with ‘breakthroughs’ in foreign policy. As
a result, ‘Gorbachev’s diplomacy often failed to win a better deal from the United
States and its allies’.66
Kornienko also believes that Gorbachev’s excessive sensitivity to Western
opinion and advice explained his hasty attempts to establish a new political sys-
tem. Gorbachev the statesman was eager to replace the dubious ‘legitimacy’ of
being chief of the communist party with the internationally recognized title of
President of the republic. Western advice can also be discerned in Gorbachev’s
political reforms, reforms that amounted to political ‘shock therapy’ for the
communist party and the Soviet people.67
Elites, Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War 157
It is impossible to either prove or disprove these allegations. Nevertheless, it is
obvious that after 1987, in a similar way to the non-use of force, Gorbachev’s
Westernism became a political factor of utmost importance in ending the Cold
War. In analyzing the records of Gorbachev’s conversations with foreign leaders
that are stored in the Archive at the Gorbachev Foundation it becomes clear
beyond any doubt that, after 1988, if not earlier, Westerners – from social democ-
rats to anti-communist conservatives – became arguably the most crucial ‘refer-
ence group’ for Gorbachev. In his meetings with these groups he found the
understanding, willingness to listen and, quite importantly, ability to appreciate
the grandiose universalist scope of his perestroika that he missed among his
colleagues in the Politburo and even among his intellectual advisers.
It is difficult to imagine the early stages of the devolution of the Cold War
without the influence of the ‘Gorby–Ronny’ personal relationship. Even more
momentous were Gorbachev’s personal relations with Helmut Kohl and George
Bush after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Bush administration quickly assumed
the initiative from the faltering hands of Gorbachev and played a very active and
stabilizing role in ending the Cold War in Europe. For Gorbachev, this was a very
important development. He found in Bush what he missed after Reagan left the
White House: an understanding and reassuring partner. At the Malta summit, on
2–3 December, Bush and Gorbachev achieved what they had sought to do months
beforehand: the cementing of a personal relationship of mutual trust and respect.68
It is remarkable, in retrospect, how much Bush, like Reagan before him, came
to believe in Gorbachev as a person of ‘common sense’ who would admit that the
West had won the Cold War. In preparations for the summit, Bush told NATO
Secretary-General Manfred Woerner on 11 October that their main aim was to
persuade the Soviets to allow the continuation of change in eastern Europe and
the GDR. When Woerner warned that Gorbachev would not let the GDR leave the
Warsaw Pact, Bush wondered if he could persuade Gorbachev to let the Warsaw
Pact go in general, that is, to recognize that its military value was no longer essen-
tial. ‘That may seem naive’, Bush said, ‘but who predicted the changes we are
seeing today?’69 One could hardly imagine any US leader trying to persuade
Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev or Andropov ‘to let go’ of the Soviet sphere of
influence in Europe. However, there was a rare harmony between Bush and
Gorbachev as they talked one on one and almost effortlessly agreed on all the
main issues at their first official summit.Conclusion
Long-term trends that had originated during the Stalinist period and were
exacerbated during the post-Stalin decades created a situation whereby a vast
majority of the bureaucracies that constituted the economic, political and intel-
lectual pillars of the Soviet empire were not prepared to fight to the death for
victory in the Cold War and the preservation of the Soviet empire. Instead, they
were surprised and disoriented by the political whirlwind unleashed by
Gorbachev’s reforms. These elites lacked elemental political experience. Growing
158 Reinterpreting the end of the Cold War
corruption and duplicity eroded the ideological and moral cohesion of Soviet
elites. Many of them aspired to a controlled, peaceful change of the system. A
growing number looked towards the Western countries, not as enemies, but as
objects of emulation and envy.
At the same time, it is clear that the Cold War was not predestined to end in
1989–90 and that the Soviet Union was not doomed to fall into pieces from the
weight of internal crisis and the weaknesses of the country’s elites. Gorbachev
was the Soviets’ last hope for peaceful evolution and gradual transformation, the
last Soviet leader who enjoyed the complete support of the elite and a general
consensus. Ultimately, however, Gorbachev deceived those same elites that he
led. In Marxist-Leninist lexicon, he betrayed his own class. After three years he
gave up on the status quo and, with the support of a small minority of intellectual
advisers, the shestidesyatniki, he rushed past the stupefied Soviet majority on to
a path of radical political reforms, meanwhile abandoning the Soviet empire and
the Soviet regime to the forces of history. Instead of searching for ways to trans-
form the old nomenklatura into a new class of owners, he opened the gates of
‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ in expectation that the home-grown intelligentsia
and the democratic West would help him to muddle through. This was a most
fundamental miscalculation that changed the world’s history.
All this may seem to belong to the realm of domestic Soviet history and politics.
How relevant was it to the history of the Cold War? How should historians of the
Cold War and international relations think about it?
First, the situation as presented above proves that the Cold War, like the world
wars of the twentieth century and the American Civil War of the nineteenth cen-
tury, was a war of societies: in a sense, a total war. This was a war characterized
by abstract and absolute goals that touched upon the very legitimacy of its main
protagonists.70 It is impossible, therefore, to study and understand the Cold War
as simply a subject of diplomatic history. Rather, it touched upon the history of
society – most importantly, the history of the elites and the leadership within
those societies – in all its diverse meanings. Domestic trends, regime changes,
and cultural and psychological transformations were to play a crucial role in this
war and determine the will of each protagonist to continue in the global compe-
tition. The erosion of Soviet militant imperialism had occurred before Gorbachev
assumed power. Thus, Gorbachev’s misguided reforms and ‘new thinking’ led to
a quick collapse of Soviet imperial will and of the Cold War consensus itself.
Second, the role of ideas and ideological influences, including the impact of the
‘benign power’ of the West and other regions of the world (like the fast-developing
east Asian countries), played an important role in the end of the Cold War. Again,
one could point to the similarly important role these same factors played in the
origins of the confrontation, when they favored the Soviet Union, the victor
against Nazism and the beacon of hope for millions of persons around the world.
The account of how the Soviet Union squandered this capital, and how an increas-
ing number of Soviet elites became susceptible to Western allurements and
‘benign power’, is also a vital aspect of the history of the Cold War. This is the
context in which the ‘structural factors’ of the Soviet crisis of the 1980s should
Elites, Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War 159
be understood. The Soviet Union was much weaker in comparison to the United
States at the end of the 1940s, when the Cold War began, than it was in the late
1980s, when the Cold War reached its end. It was other processes and factors –
principally unfolding within the elites and at the leadership level – that destroyed
Soviet will and undermined the rationale to oppose the United States.
Third, the role of the nation’s leader is crucial in explaining Soviet behavior
during the Cold War, both at the beginning of the conflict, when Stalin made fate-
ful choices that plunged the Soviet Union into a confrontation with the United
States, and at its end, when Gorbachev’s no less momentous choices made this
confrontation irrelevant. While it is impossible to imagine the end of the Cold
War without the agency of such Western leaders as Ronald Reagan and George
Bush, their contribution was secondary in importance. The contribution of
Gorbachev, whatever his motives, was primary and absolutely crucial to events.
The permanent presence of nuclear weapons was perhaps a critical factor in pre-
venting the outbreak of ‘a hegemonic war’ during all stages of the Cold War. At
the same time, it was the Gorbachev factor alone that accounted for the absence
of violence at the conclusion of this bipolar confrontation, when the Soviet
empire disintegrated like a house of cards. Gorbachev’s citation of the Russian
poet Feodor Tyutchev implied that he wanted to remake the Soviet Union and
Europe not ‘by iron and blood, but by love’. It may sound a bit presumptuous, but
such a maxim reflected changes on the ground, again, not as a result of the logic
of realpolitik, but as a conscious attempt on the part of the Soviet leader and his
advisers to avoid it.
Notes
1 Dmitry Furman, ‘Nasha strannaia revolutsiia’ (Our Strange Revolution), Svobodnaya
mysl, 1 (1993); Walter Laqueur, ‘Gorbachev and Epimetheus: The Origins of the
Russian Crisis,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 28, 3 (July 1993); Vladislav M.
Zubok, ‘The Collapse of the Soviet Union: Leadership, Elites, and Legitimacy’, in
Geir Lundestad (ed.), The Fall of Great Powers. Peace, Stability, and Legitimacy (Oslo:
Scandinavian University Press/Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 157–8.
2 See M. S. Gorbachev, Godi trudnikh reshenii. Izbrannoie 1985–1992 (Moscow: Alfa-
print, 1993); The Union Could Be Preserved: The White Book: Documents and
Facts about Policy of M. S. Gorbachev to Reform and Preserve the Multi-National
State (Moscow: April Publishers, 1995); Vadim Medvedev, Raspad: Kak on nazreval v
’mirovoi sisteme sotsializma (Moscow: Mezhdunarodniie otnosheniia, 1994); Georgii
Shakhnazarov, Tsena svobodi: Reformatsiia Gorbacheva glazami iego pomoshnika
(Moscow: Rossika-Zevs, 1993); Anatoly S. Chernyaev, Shest Let s Gorbachevim. Po
Dnevnikovim Zapisiam (Moscow: Progress-Kultura, 1993), now published in the
United States, trans. Robert English and Liza Tucker A.S. Chernyaev, My six years
with Gorbachev, ed. Robert English, trans. by Elizabeth Tucker, with a forward of
Jack Matlock, (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Valerii Boldin,
Krusheniie pedestala: Shtrikhi k portretu M. S. Gorbacheva (Moscow: Respublika,
1995); Yegor Ligachev, Zagadka Gorbacheva (Novosibirsk: Interbuk, 1992); Vitalii
Vorotnikov, A bylo eto tak: Iz dnevnika chlena Politbyuro TsK KPSS (Moscow: Sovet
Veteranov Knigoizdaniya SI-MAR, 1995); Nikolai Ryzhkov, Desyat let velikikh
potraysenii (Moscow: Kniga, Prosvescheniie, Miloserdie, 1996); Nilokai Ryzhkov,
160 Reinterpreting the end of the Cold War
Perestroika: Istoriya predatelstv (Moscow: Novosti, 1992); Vladimir Kryuchkov,
Lichnoie delo, 2 vols (Moscow: Olimp, 1996); Nikolai S. Leonov, Likholetie (Moscow:
Terra, 1997); Oleg Shenin, Rodinu ne prodaval (Moscow: Paleyia, 1994); Sergei
Akhromeyev and Georgii Kornienko, Glazami marshala i